


The Light in Your Heart

by jdjunkie



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, F/M, Lovers to Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 22:05:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1833883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdjunkie/pseuds/jdjunkie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at how Jack and Sara may have reconnected through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Light in Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Paian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/gifts).



> Written to paian's prompt: Jack/Sara, finding their way home. First posted at the DW Event Horizons community.

_“If light is in your heart, you will find the way home” - Rumi_

 

The first time they meet, after Jack comes home from the putative suicide mission to find an empty house, they sit in a coffee shop and stare at the coffee and then at the walls because it’s easier than looking at each other.

All around them are couples, sitting together, often not speaking, but sharing space. He envies them that normality, and he’s never envied anyone anything before. He has a wife, a son, a career. He has the dream.

He _had_ those things. He’s still struggling with tenses.

It’s the most normal, mundane of things, drinking coffee with your partner, perhaps during a shopping break, or as a way of slowly decompressing after work, but Jack craves that mundanity like he craves the soft feel of his son’s hair beneath his fingers. In the empty place that is his heart, he knows with utter certainty that he’ll never have either of those things again. He’ll never have what these people are having, as they sip their lattes, read the papers, talk about everything and nothing.

There is no normal. There is no everyday.

As a man once said, ain’t that a kick in the head.

“I boxed up your things,” Sara says, eventually. Jack finally looks at her. Her eyes are dry, her face pale. She’s lost weight. He wants to hold her.

“I’ll stop by tomorrow night. If that’s okay.” It’s not okay. Nothing about what has happened to them will ever be okay.

Sara nods, takes another sip, her eyes not meeting his. She can’t look at him. “I’ll be out but you can use your key.”

“I can make it some other time ...”

“No.” She’s tense, her whole body screaming that she wants to be anywhere but here. Jack wants to run. Not run away, although that’s looking a viable option right now. No ... he wants to run. Running helps. You can only think about breathing in and out when you’re running. There isn’t room for anything else. No space for guilt or recrimination. “Just take your stuff,” she says, voice flat, emotionless, so unlike Sara. “You can post your key through the door when you’re done.”

“Sara ...” This isn’t right. They were the greatest.

“When you’re done, Jack,” she reiterates.

They’re done. They’re over.

Jack nods.

They’re done.

>>>> 

Sometimes, he just wants to hear her voice.

Sara has a distinctive voice - a little throaty, occasionally commanding, always compelling. It sounds like home. Her voice, her laughter, had kept him sane when he was broken and crawling through the desert. Her voice and Charlie’s smile.

He misses the touch of Sara’s gentle hand on his cheek, the feel of her skin as she moves beneath him, but he misses her voice most of all.

“Sara?” His hand is sweaty and shaking as he holds the phone. He tells himself it has nothing to do with the half-empty whiskey bottle sitting on the table beside him.

“Hi.” He can tell, just from the single word, that she doesn’t want to speak to him. And she’ll know that he knows. They know each other too well. They can hurt each other too easily because of it.

“Are you okay to talk?”

“Not really. I’m just on my way out the door.”

He grips the phone so tightly he thinks it might actually shatter.

“Okay. I just ... wanted to know how it’s going. With you.”

More silence.

“It’s going. Isn’t that all we can hope for?” She sounds so brittle. He can shatter her, just like he can shatter the phone.

“As long as ...”

“Look. I have to go.”

The silence is heavy. He doesn’t know how to end the call, doesn’t want to.

“Jack, I have to go.” There’s a crack in her voice as she fills the silence. Perhaps she wants to spare him the pain that the silence represents. In the depths of her grief, maybe she wants to give him that. He clings desperately to the thought. But her slight loss of control nearly kills him. It speaks of a vulnerability that she so rarely allows anyone to see or hear. But he recognizes it. He’s seen her at her most vulnerable, in life, in bed, in the midst of a death no one should have to experience.

“Sure,” he says.

He holds onto the receiver long after she’s gone.

>>>> 

“I don’t understand any of it,” she says, despairing. “First, there’s a you who’s not you and then there’s ...”

Charlie. There’s Charlie. Jack can still see him, still feel his hand within his grasp as they stood on the ramp. But it wasn’t Charlie. Charlie’s gone.

“I want to explain. I want you to understand.” He wants to give her at least that much. She deserves so much more. They’re sitting in the den of the house that was their home, Sara in the armchair where she used to nurse Charlie and Jack on the sofa where they used to snuggle and giggle as they ate Saturday-night popcorn and watched crappy TV. “I can get you security clearance.”

She looks at him and he sees fear but more than that he sees that resolute, steely core that has sustained her through the worst of tragedies. “I don’t want your clearance. If I had it, it wouldn’t change anything.”

It wouldn’t bring Charlie back.

“But, god, he looked so much like him.” Her eyes fill and she turns her head away.

He swallows. “I know.”

Sara gathers herself together with a strength Jack can only marvel at. “Whatever ... it ... was, and whatever it was that wore your face, I have to believe they were created for a reason. Clones, robots, whatever. I don’t understand the technology and I don’t need to. But,” and she looks at him, blue eyes blazing, “there has to be a reason.”

He flounders. She’s trying to make sense of it all.

She leans forward, clasping her hands so tightly that her knuckles are white. “Did seeing Charlie one last time,” she falters, then carries on quickly, “did it bring you any kind of comfort?”

Of all the questions she could ask, he isn’t prepared for that one.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “In some way I can’t explain, yeah, I think it did.”

She nods, her clasped hands relaxing slightly. “Then it’s worth it,” she says. Worth the pain of being confronted by her loss in such a devastating way. Worth it to her.

Jack thinks he’s never loved her more than at this moment.

>>>> 

Sometimes, he just needs to hear her voice.

“Jack?”

“Hey.”

How did she know?

“I just ... I don’t know. I had a feeling I had to call. You know that sort of tingly, vaguely disconcerting feeling you get that niggles away until you do something about it? Well, that. Actually, I’ve had it since this morning. So ... here I am.”

He wants to reach through the phone wire and hug her.

“Jack? Is everything all right?”

He opens his mouth to speak but the knot that has resided in his stomach seems to have taken up residence in his throat.

“Has something happened?” And now she sounds scared.

“I ... we ... lost someone last night.”

“Oh, Jack,” she breathes out her sorrow. This is not new. She’s been there for him through the loss of other comrades, buddies.

“Can I ask who?”

He’s torn. He wants to tell her, wants to share his grief and anger, but knows he can’t. His silence is her answer.

“Of course you can’t,” she says, sadly. She knows the score.

He fights off mental images of iso rooms and a friend on the edge of tears as he chooses a new path that will take him away from those he loves. “I’m sorry,” he says, flatly.

“I think that’s my line here, don’t you?” Gentle humor, edged in mild sarcasm. So Sara.

He holds onto the phone, listens to her breathe and finds comfort.

“I’m glad you called,” he says, eventually, when he becomes afraid she’ll hang up because he has nothing to say.

“Me, too,” she says.

The rest of the call is all but silent. It lasts an hour.

>>>> 

“Can’t believe he’d be 18,” Sara says, quietly.

Ten years have gone by. A decade. However you measure it, it feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago.

Jack slips his arm around Sara’s shoulder as they stare at the headstone. It’s a beautiful day, sunny, not too warm, with a playful breeze drifting lazily through the trees in the cemetery.

“We’d be fending off girls unable to resist his O’Neill charm right, left and center,” Jack says. “Like father like son.”

Sara finds a smile for him. It’s a little wan, but it’s there. “Oh, please.”

“Hey. You didn’t know me when I was 18.”

“You would have been too busy playing hockey, going on hiking adventures with your best buds. Oh, and fishing. You’d have been fishing.” She gives him a sideways look that says _you know I’m right._

“You’re right,” he says. “Like always.”

She smiles up at him, then bends to fuss with the sunflowers and touch the top of the stone in a mute farewell.

Jack lets her set the pace here and waits as she takes a moment, lost in her own thoughts. Finally, she turns and starts to walk away. He catches up to her and they stroll companionably towards her car.

“Thanks for coming with me,” she says. “Don had to fly out to New York on business and I didn’t want to come alone. I know you wouldn’t be here through choice.”

He wouldn’t. He hasn’t been here for years and hasn’t felt the need to. He knows where Charlie is and it isn’t in this place.

“Yeah, well. Being here for a few minutes isn’t going to kill me.”

Sara halts and tilts her head, looking at him closely. “Losing Charlie nearly killed you, though.”

Jack grimaces and shrugs further into his jacket. “It was a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Sara says, suddenly, quickly. “I’m sorry for all the hurt.”

Jack shakes his head. “I think I’m the one who should be saying that.” He looks up at the sun, squints, looks at the trees. Anywhere but at Sara. “And I should have said it a long time ago.”

“You did. In all kinds of ways,” she says. “I just wasn’t ready to hear it.”

Sara reaches for Jack’s hand and squeezes his cold fingers. Then she stands on tip-toe and kisses his cheek softly. A wave of melancholy spreads through Jack in a relentless rush. Her touch still resonates so deeply. She slips her arm through his and they resume their walk, matching their stride the way they always did. “Had your heart broken lately?” she asks, out of the blue.

He gives her a look.

She nudges him.

“Come on, Jack. Are you seeing anyone?”

He rolls his eyes.

She grins. “You _so_ are. So ... spill. Blonde? Brunette? Redhead?”

He shakes his head.

“Is it serious? Are you ... oh, my god, are you going to get _married_?”

“Woah! Where did you get that idea?”

“Because you’re being all coy and silent and mysterious.”

“I’m not. I’m just being a gentleman.”

She snorts with laughter and quickly reins herself in when a passing couple throw them a disapproving look. Jack nudges her and whispers, “Behave.”

“I want to meet this person.”

Jack knows when he’s beaten. She’s like a terrier with a bone. “Okay, okay. Next time you’re in Washington.”

They reach the car and Sara walks round to the driver side. “It’s a date,” she says, brightly.

As Jack settles into the passenger seat, he prepares for the never-ending argument over the choice of music for the journey, but decides to forego the customary wrangling and lets the Cowboy Junkies wash over him.

He’s suddenly tired; being here has taken more out of him than he imagined. He turns his head and watches Sara drive.

>>>>> 

The coffee shop is bustling. There’s a line almost out the door and he’s glad he ordered when he got here; a flat white for him, a skinny latte for her.

She waves as she comes in and wends her way through the crowds to the sofa he managed to purloin. He stands and kisses her then pulls her in for a hug.

“You found it,” he says, taking her overnight bag from her.

“Yeah,” she says, looking around. “Wow. It’s busy. This place your regular haunt?”

“When I have the time. Which is not very often.”

Sara plonks herself down, sighing with relief, and kicks off her shoes. She takes a sip of coffee and makes an appreciative noise. “Can’t stay long. I have a business meeting at two o’clock and Don’s taking me to the theatre tonight for our anniversary. Who says you can’t mix business with pleasure? We’re flying home tomorrow. So?” She looks more excited than a kid on Christmas Eve. “Show me!” she says, exasperated.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a box containing matching rings.

She takes it from his hand and opens it up. “Oh,” she says, excitement muting to quiet appreciation. “They’re beautiful. I love the color. I don’t recognize the metal.”

Jack takes the box from her fingers. “It’s, er, rare. Got a hell of a long name. Can’t even pronounce it.” He hates the small lie.

“Well,” she says, smiling. “They’re perfect. Plans going okay?”

“Yup.”

“Measured for your suit?”

“I’m wearing my blues.”

“Even though you’ve just retired?”

“Even though.”

All around them, couples are chatting, sharing details of their day, getting on with the everyday stuff. There’s a good vibe. It feels right to be here with her.

“I’m happy for you,” she says, laying her hand on his, and he knows she means it.

Her hair is different, longer than back in day, and her figure is fuller. She looks great. She’s still beautiful and strong. Still the woman he fell in love with.

“Thanks,” he says.

They may be over, but they’ll never be done.

 

ends


End file.
